The Asia-Pacific region is home to 68.6 per cent of the world’s Wi-Fi hotspots, new figures from ABI Research show.
According to techworld.com, by the end of 2013, there were 4.2 million Wi-Fi hotspots across the world. It is predicted that this figure will more than double by 2018 to reach 10.5 million.
China is responsible for the majority of hotspots in the Asia-Pacific region, with the country boasting 620,000 places where people can connect to the internet wirelessly. Latin America comes second for the region with the most hotspots, accounting for 12.3 per cent of the world’s total. Europe sits in third place with nine per cent, but the Middle East and Africa place last with just 1.4 per cent, reports digitimes.com.
Jake Saunders, VP and practice director of core forecasting at ABI Research, explains that Wi-Fi has more benefits than just boosting coverage and capacity for fixed-line operators.
“Wi-Fi also represents a good opportunity for fixed-line operators to join in the mobile broadband field,” he states. “The UK fixed-line operator BT with 200,000 of Wi-Fi hotspots (excluding homespots) is also providing Wi-Fi roaming services to mobile operators and other Wi-Fi providers.”
ABI says Wi-Fi hotspot numbers will grow by about 15 per cent a year and in turn, this will help offload a lot of the data being sent over mobile networks, which is expected to increase dramatically over the coming years.
